


Et in Arcadia

by kristophine



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Death in Childbirth, M/M, Mary Morstan Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 06:40:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12053427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristophine/pseuds/kristophine
Summary: Perhaps John should have known that it would be impossible to keep the event from Sherlock. His trick of reading thoughts—reading the chain of them from the passing expressions of John’s face—was in its infancy, then, but he would still have given any archbishop pause during the days of the Inquisition.





	Et in Arcadia

**Author's Note:**

> I've been reading Sherlock Holmes for over twenty years, but I don't have a brit-picker, and it may show. Feel free to volunteer!

Perhaps John should have known that it would be impossible to keep the event from Sherlock. His trick of reading thoughts—reading the chain of them from the passing expressions of John’s face—was in its infancy, then, but he would still have given any archbishop pause during the days of the Inquisition.

John, of course, had to bear some of the responsibility for the situation. He should certainly have gone directly to his room; muttered an explanation to the effect that he had a terrible pain in the temples, and must lie down. Instead, he stood just at the top of the stairs, staring bleakly into the sitting room, before giving himself a shake and moving to sit.

It was quite dark; only a few embers still crackled. Sherlock was, as was his wont, sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace, in his favourite dressing-gown. The rich burgundy of it nearly vanished in the low light of the room.

Sherlock’s fingers were steepled beneath his chin. After a moment, he said, apropos of nothing, “So he has noticed, then.”

John tipped his head back, slouching deeper into the settee. He said nothing. There was a dull pounding in his head which, after a moment’s thought, he was able to identify as the thunderous beat of his heart, evidently sharing his panic at Sherlock’s cursed deduction. Of all the things he would have preferred Sherlock to at least _pretend_ to ignorance regarding—

“Is it quite that bad?” Sherlock’s voice was markedly quiet in the stillness of the room, which was oppressive, full of the winding tendrils of tobacco smoke. “I thought him rather inoffensive.”

John took a deep breath. “Not nearly inoffensive enough.”

“Well, it was always a given that he was a fool. He should have offered you much more.”

“He’s been a fine editor.”

Sherlock tapped his pipe out, slowly. John could not help but think of someone in the presence of a frightened deer, which very nearly made him laugh. It might have done, had he not been so weary and sick at heart.

“What did he say?”

The silence hung between them for long minutes, the embers hissing, one small glowing stick collapsing in a short-lived shower of sparks.

“Don’t you know?” John asked at length, profoundly weary, hearing it in his voice but quite unable to bring himself to care.

“I should prefer to have it from you.” Sherlock had not once looked at him yet.

“He wanted to know—” John had to stop himself, coughing briefly, though there was nothing in his throat more sinister than grief: he would lose so much, by this. “He inquired as to whether I were quite _aware_ that I wrote about you as one might a wife.”

Sherlock was utterly immobile, an Eastern statue upon the hearth-rug. “I see.”

“I know.”

Sherlock struck a match, produced from somewhere obscure, and lit his pipe again, lapsing into the soft puffing breaths of a man hard at work on a problem that strictly speaking deserved no pipes at all.

They sat in silence for some time after that, until John levered himself to his feet, groaning softly. He had made it nearly across the room when Sherlock spoke.

“Is it so bad, then, my dear?”

John stopped, back still turned to Sherlock and the dying fire.

“I—” He simply couldn’t think how to respond to such a patently absurd question. Of course it was; what else could it be?

Sherlock read his hesitation and leapt into the breach. “What does he _know?_ ”

“Nothing, I imagine,” said John around the stricture in his throat. “And yet quite enough, shouldn’t you think?”

“A suspicion kindled in the mind of a dullard to whom you are currently profitable hardly signifies. What do you imagine he would do with the knowledge? Whisper it? To what friends, at what club?”

John pressed his palm to his eyes. “And what would _you_ know of it?”

There was another of those fraught pauses, and John had made up his mind to retire to bed when Sherlock spoke again.

“You were truly unaware that I engage your affections?” The words hit him like a bolt of lightning. “That hardly seems in keeping. You haven’t the soul of a detective, but you have surely known _yourself_ long enough to be at least passingly observant of the depths of your regard for me.”

John staggered and had to put his hand against the wall, palm splayed. “How—oh, for Heaven’s sake, must you? _Must_ you?”

There was a faint rustle and shift behind him; Sherlock had stood, then, and moved toward him. A soldier’s senses warned him, even while he knew quite well he was utterly safe, here in the heart of London, under the protection of the greatest detective who had ever lived.

“John,” said Sherlock, his voice so very low, nearly inaudible above the crackle of embers and the distant noise of horses in the street. “John, what _would_ you do with me if you had me?”

John shut his eyes tightly, still leaning against the wall. Perhaps this would all be revealed as a terrible dream.

“You went to public school. You served, for God’s sake. You must _know._ ”

He could feel the air shift as Sherlock moved around him; moved in front of him, to bar his retreat to his own room. There was a pressure of fingers on his jaw, and he opened his eyes, half-outraged already.

The outrage had to die on his lips even as he opened his mouth; Sherlock regarded him in the guttering light, his face mere inches away, the breath from his lips a gust across John’s.

“What would you _do?_ ” asked Sherlock, again, though his fine proud lips barely shaped the words.

It was more than any mortal man should be asked to bear; and John, certainly, could not bear it. He raised his hands to either side of Sherlock’s head and gripped the soft, warm hair, in disarray despite his pomade, and pressed his lips to Sherlock’s. If he would insist on asking, John must be pardoned for making an answer.

Sherlock hardly breathed, angling his head such that John found himself pressing forward, their chests nearly touching.

John broke away first, breath coming harsh and loud in the quiet room. Sherlock exhaled, shudderingly, and it was as though a fire had been lit in the scant space between them, consuming what little oxygen remained.

“You can’t—” John began, unsure how he would complete the thought.

“I can’t, or you won’t?” Sherlock cocked his head to one side. Unfairly, that gilded the column of his neck with the remnants of the firelight.

“ _You_ can’t afford it, you haven’t the position—”

“Hang my _position_ ,” said Sherlock savagely. With his long-fingered iron grip, he seized John’s chin in his hand and kissed John. He pulled John’s body against his, backing into the wall, and John found himself bracing his hands to either side of Sherlock’s head, skin fairly alight with desire. He had felt this way only a handful of times in his life, certainly not since he was a youth, and he had managed to dismiss it, in the intervening years, as the product of inexperience and anticipation. If he had known he might be ambushed by this sensation as a grown man of three-and-thirty, he would certainly have been more grateful for the time he had been permitted to remain free of it.

And yet; and yet, now that it burned in him again, now that Sherlock had opened his mouth, and their bodies were moving in unison against the wall, John pressing forward thoughtlessly again and again, he could not bring himself to regret it. The fabric of Sherlock’s dressing-gown was quite thin, and through it, his sinewy body radiated heat.

Sherlock gripped John’s shirt-front. With a shock as of cold water, John remembered what he must, and drew back, gasping.

“Mary,” he said.

“To the devil with Mary.” Sherlock’s grip tightened cruelly, pulling John yet closer against him. “What has she to do with us?”

“I—I made a promise—I’m _engaged_ to be _wed,_ I can’t—I must not—”

“Mustn’t what, you great jelly?” Sherlock thrust him back. John had a bad habit of forgetting the tremendous strength in Sherlock’s wiry frame, his boxer’s light-footed agility. “Mustn’t admit what we now both know?”

“How long—?” John felt dazed, still.

“I’ve known you were mashed on me since a quarter-hour after we met,” Sherlock said crisply. The clear, ruthless delivery was marred by the manic glint in his eyes, his kiss-flushed lips, how his chest heaved for air. “You have only been in _love_ with me since you figured out that I had been having it on at your expense with regards to Copernicus.”

“But—” not so long ago, surely, he wanted to protest. But he knew it, even as Sherlock said it, even as he moved to protest; he knew that Sherlock was absolutely right, and that his decision to leave the ridiculous notion that Sherlock hadn’t known the correct alignments of the planets in the manuscript simply to annoy him had been a symptom of this dread condition.

“Yes,” said Sherlock. His eyes were very wide in the firelight, and very light, the grey indistinguishable from what could have been a pale blue or even a soft green. “That long.”

“I’m to be married,” he said through benumbed lips. “I can’t. I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know, and if I—if I were the sort of man to ignore a vow, then I certainly shouldn’t be the sort of man who would be worthy of you.”

“Oh, you stupid man, you unbearable idiot! To not have known until now, until some _stranger_ told you your own heart. I don’t give a _fig_ for your _worthiness!_ ” Sherlock spat the words out, cheeks flushing dull red. “Come here and kiss me, and tell me that nonsense again!”

“No. My love, no.” John covered Sherlock’s hand where it gripped his wrist. “You must know.”

Sherlock’s face collapsed at all once, the hot air going out of him as if he had been a punctured bellows. “Very well.”

He lifted his hand from John’s arm—removed himself from between John and the wall—and walked briskly to the mantelpiece.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said John, ready to be in a fine temper. “If that’s the cocaine—”

It was not. The tremulous screech of an untuned violin announced Sherlock’s mood, with perfect tonality.

John retreated to his own room, conceding defeat, however ungraciously. Sherlock played well into the wee hours, with never a word from Mrs. Hudson.

 

They made a go of it, by and by. Sherlock never spoke of that night again. John made slight alterations to his manuscripts, emphasizing Sherlock’s cool, emotionless logic, his life of the mind, the absence of his heart. He refrained from mentioning where Sherlock’s heart might have gotten to.

Mary was, as it happened, every bit as fine a woman as John had thought on pledging himself to her. She had a vibrant grace about her, and the way she moved from room to room like a flame, like the dancing bubbles in a coup of champagne, might well remind him of someone else he had known, light on his feet as Mercury, wearing a laurel wreath.

Her sense of humor went a long way toward reminding John that he had not, after all, made the _wrong_ decision; merely a decision which might have gone differently, had he been fully in possession of the facts prior to making it. He did love her, after all, as much for her lively mind as for her welcoming, voluptuous embrace. He couldn’t help but worry at the idea of her slender hips—but a family of their very own, what a fine thing that would be. They had a few false starts, but she kept a brave face on it.  

The night Sherlock arrived at John’s house in a fine state of disarray, babbling on about his imminent murder, John was prepared to believe nearly anything—that Sherlock had finally gone mad, perhaps, or that Sherlock had decided to play an elaborate prank. When he did accept that Sherlock was mortally afraid, his duty was clear. He followed Sherlock to Switzerland, and if there were long silences on the train, spaces of time where Sherlock gazed pensively out the window at the passing landscape, or where Sherlock slept and John watched his face, which would have suited a Classical statue, so finely carved from marble, unlined and flawless, then that was no one else’s affair but theirs.

Reichenbach was beautiful. Lovely, as a snake beneath a flower might be lovely. If John had known—if he had suspected for a moment—but he had been occupied, had he not, by the thought of what he might do, alone at the falls with Sherlock, the faint mist of water rising up from the booming canyon dewing Sherlock’s lashes, gilding his cheeks. He left as much to spare himself as to answer his physician’s duty.

When he discovered what the cost of that decision had been, the strength left his body. He thought it might never return.

 

Mary died, some year or so after, a great haemorrhage in the course of a much too early childbed. John, hands red up to the wrist, tried desperately to save her, with the enormous weight of a husband’s and a physician’s guilt on his soul—but the uterine sweep was unsuccessful at dislodging whatever had led to her bleeding, and she died, face white as wax, the salty reek of her womb’s blood filling the candle-lit room.

John wept until his eyes were scorched with it, until he fancied he had no salt left in him. There would be no more conversations before the fire, then; no more lazy mornings, laughing with her in the tumble of sheets, or her hand on the angle of his jaw while she helped him shave, laughing if he had missed a spot.

Mary had no family to attend her funeral. John thought of drinking himself stuporous, but in the end, he only sat in the churchyard for hours every day, until he could at last bring himself to resume his regular duties.

John had always been a man with a fine appreciation of duty.

 

He attended concerts. Read the papers. He tried to imagine what Holmes would have said to him. He had, at some point, managed to stop thinking of Holmes as _Sherlock,_ had drifted away from the memory of those mesmerizing hands, the shocking intimacy of those fingers on his chin, those lips on his.

He had almost managed to stop thinking of it.

He knew it was not uncommon for the bereaved to hallucinate the lost loved one, and he waited to determine whether he might be granted another glimpse of Mary, but none came. The memory of Mary’s agonized screams grew faded, as a patched garment. A hair-shirt, perhaps, which he could not bear to put wholly away. How many husbands had he similarly consoled, in the years of his career? How many times had he scrubbed at the blood under his nails before going out of the room of sorrow? And yet how little had he ever understood how grief would grow into the soul, a thousand prying roots, sucker-vines seething up to spoil his sleep.

Mortimer Street was too familiar, the scene of too many intolerable griefs. He moved to Kensington, further from the center of London, from the hustle and bustle to which he had grown so accustomed. He was a touch further from his practice, as well, but it made no difference how long he traveled each day; there was no presence at home to comfort him when he returned in the evening. He took on more patients and let his rounds take up more of his day.

He attended performances featuring a solo violin. He closed his eyes, listening to the magnificent shower of notes, and could not help but contrast the mechanical perfection of it with the slow, drawling beauty of the renditions that had accompanied many sleepless nights.

The hall echoed with the last remnants of the vibration, dying away. There was the packed silence, the expectant hush, just before the applause.

That was always the moment he found himself half-expecting to hear another familiar voice. Once more. Just once more.

 

He read the papers, which was how he determined to visit the site of the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair.

It struck no chord of alarm or recognition in him when the old man whose books he had knocked to the ground offered him Catullus. Perhaps it should have; after all, hadn’t Catullus been the poet who had written, _Since you lay down such punishments for unhappy love, now, after this, I’ll never steal kisses again._

When he looked up and saw Sherlock’s face, the world swam. It obstinately refused to right itself, even when he returned to consciousness, and found Sherlock kneeling over him. “Wake up, darling, do wake up,” Sherlock was whispering, fingers searching John’s scalp. “You’re not hurt, surely you’re not hurt?”

John reached up with some effort and took Sherlock’s hand in his, tightening his fingers around those he knew so well.

“What in God’s name—” John said.

Sherlock seized John’s hand in both his and kissed them. With such a simple gesture it was as though the world had been sere and grey, and had now undergone a miraculous transformation into the full flower of spring: he had been blinded, and sight had returned; he had been deafened, and now the gift of hearing had been restored.

“I can only attempt to express my regrets, my—apologies, my sorrow. I know it was unforgivable, quite unforgivable, but darling, they _couldn’t_ know how important you were, or they would certainly have killed you, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t have survived that, I don’t think. And you had Mary, and I had no one, nothing. I thought I might as well have been dead and when I realized I _could_ be dead, as near as, I thought it was a gift from God. Be as angry as you must be, my dear, but don’t send me away. Don’t send me away.”

The shock of the impassioned speech was not much less than the shock of seeing that dear face once again. John struggled to sit up, and Sherlock immediately reached to assist him, a hand behind his back. That steady, warm presence he had long known on the endless nights of their investigations, or sitting before the fire.

“Send you—whyever would I send you away?” asked John, bewildered.

“How long did I go without a letter? Without a word to you? Oh, I am so sorry, so dreadfully sorry. I thought it would be better for the both of us if it were as if I were truly dead. I was wrong. I know I was wrong.”

“You—” John shook his head. “You let me believe you were _dead,_ to _spare_ me?”

“I thought so.” Sherlock’s eyes burned with fervent sincerity, lip trembling, giving the lie to his determinedly stoic expression. He still wore his ridiculous get-up, as if he were a geriatric book seller. His face was mere inches from John’s. “You must be angry, and you’ve every right.”

“Damn right I’m angry. I’m bloody _furious._ ” John closed the distance and kissed Sherlock soundly.

Sherlock groaned as though John had struck him, and wrapped his hands around John’s forearms, grip tightening painfully. He opened his mouth, and at the blooming heat, John pushed him to the ground, kneeling above him, between Sherlock’s parted legs.

“I’m still _yours,_ ” John murmured into Sherlock’s ear. Sherlock’s hips hitched up quite without thought, legs wrapping around John’s waist.

“The maid.” Despite the words, Sherlock was wrestling himself out of his frock-coat. “Can’t you—send her out, for the day?”

“In this state?”

“Get rid of her!”

John had to get to his feet, and recompose himself, so that when he told Bridy she could take the rest of the evening off as he and his old friend were going to have a bit of brandy and talk over the war, she merely brightened and skipped off toward the kitchen, rather than eyeing his state of considerable disarray. Luckily, Bridy’s charm had never been any great intelligence, but rather her docile and diligent nature.

That he had to undergo this trial while keenly aware that Sherlock was stripping to his skin in the study was really too much.

He returned to the study and closed the door carefully behind himself, throwing the lock as a precaution. It was a miracle that he remembered, because Sherlock was lying on the divan, quite naked, one leg bent up, the other dangling off the edge, much as he had been wont to lie in the evenings when they had shared lodgings, albeit never in such a degree of dishabille.

“You shall have to move back to Baker Street with me at once, of course,” said Sherlock, with an ease that suggested he was _not_ currently nude and in a state of some excitement.

“Of course, you devil,” agreed John as he began to tear off his clothes.

“Why, my dear, I thought you would retain more modesty than this!” Sherlock propped himself up on one elbow, grinning; it was a stark contrast to the morose face he’d worn only a quarter of an hour before.

“You’ve years of _modesty_ to make up to me.” John stepped out of his smalls and fell to his knees beside the divan. There was no humor to the way Sherlock at once seized his hands again and kissed them, mouthing at the knuckles; John could not help the soft noise that rose to his lips.

“Ah, my darling.” Sherlock pulled John’s hands against his chest. “What would you do with me? Shall we be schoolboys again?”

“If you did this sort of thing with other boys at school, I’ll see them flayed,” said John, and dipped his head to take Sherlock’s cock in his mouth.

Sherlock made a most gratifying noise, despite an attempt to stifle it with his own hand. John hummed around his length, and Sherlock’s hips moved ever so slightly; John put his free hand on Sherlock’s thigh and coaxed him forward, and in a matter of a few minutes Sherlock was spending into John’s mouth, body jack-knifing upward, very nearly knocking John in the chin with his knee.

“Good heavens,” said Sherlock, laughing ruefully, panting, draping his arm across his eyes, “I haven’t been so quick to go off in—well, quite a long time, my dear.”

“I shall believe that when I have a decided bit more evidence.”

“Oh! You ruffian!” Sherlock lunged forward and tackled John to the ground, and shortly had John in a similarly compromising position.

After, they lay in silence, appreciating the rapidly fading light of the April evening where it penetrated the curtains. The rug beneath them was not of the greatest comfort, nor were their bones as young as they had once been; but neither seemed inclined to move.

At length, Sherlock said, “I was quite serious about returning to Baker Street, if you’ll have me.”

It was the closest John might ever receive to a declaration.

“I certainly will,” he said. “I’ll give notice immediately.”

Sherlock kissed him soundly. John had the sense he had narrowly averted an extended listing of the positive attributes of the Baker Street flat, and with some relief, he returned the kisses.

What a strange world; what a strange way to return to this point, how very different the circumstances were, and how much pain had they endured separately to be together once more.

“Catullus, indeed,” he said. Sherlock, not pretending to misunderstand, burst into a whole-throated, musical laugh; then paused, lips dipping at the corners pensively.

“ _Longing to see the light, so that I might speak to you, and be with you.”_ He kissed John once more. “How many times did I think of those lines, in Tibet?”

“ _Tibet?_ ”

“Oh, I have so much to tell you!” He sat up, and gathered the throw from the divan about his narrow shoulders. His eyes were alight with interest. “You haven’t heard a thing of my adventures! Darling, will you get the brandy? No, no, just bring the decanter, we shan’t be civilized today. Why should we start now?”

So, charmed, however unwillingly, John sat down next to Sherlock with the decanter, watching the dying embers of the sunset twinkling in the crystal, and settled in for a long recitation of stupendous voyages, mistaken identity, and mystical disguises.

Just as it should be.


End file.
